Lucinda C. Foster 1940 - 2020
Cindy Foster, wife of Van Foster and mother of Dana and Lisa,
started cancer treatment in 2017, entered hospice at home in Reston in December
2019 and died peacefully on January 5th, 2020, at age 79. Her daughters and their families were able to
visit her at Thanksgiving and Christmas, which Cindy greatly enjoyed.
Cindy was born in Chevy Chase, MD, the youngest of five and
consequently the resilient one who raised herself. She attended Sidwell Friends School and Tufts University where she met Van. An
education major led to teaching elementary school in Connecticut, Fairfax and
Clark Air Base and retirement in 1995. But
after a few years she took up tutoring with a local charity (one child at a time
was a pleasure) for ten more years.
Van’s work included
three years in the Philippines where vacations included touring parts of East
Asia and a gamey road trip in northern Luzon.
On a two-year posting in Liberia, their 4WD Chevy Blazer took them to
Sierra Leone and Ivory Coast. Best was
probably the bush taxi ride from Bamako to Bandiagara and the Dogon
country.
She was a lifelong athlete in field hockey, tennis, swimming
and girls basketball (the latter in the “six-on- six” days when players were
limited to half court, which particularly rankled Cindy). Van took up racquetball after finding he was
no match for her in tennis.
Although the tennis faded with age, hiking, birdwatching and
quilting kept Cindy busy. Travelling was a itch first scratched when she and a Jackson classmate toured Europe in Cindy's new red VW the summer after graduation from Tufts. The itch didn’t fade and after retirement she and Van spent a cumulative 16 months living
in a VW camper while driving around Europe and the US; all told, they were away
from Reston about 40 percent of the time.
Her parents’ hilltop cabin in Maine played a big part in her
early life and inspired building a cabin on nearby Long Lake where she enjoyed
kayaking, snorkeling, skiing and poking around in the woods. In 2004, she achieved her life goal of
climbing all forty-seven 4,000 footers in the White Mountains.
During much of this, Cindy was also raising two wonderful
daughters who went on to careers and children of their own. She was immensely pleased to host
everyone at the cabin for several weeks each summer.
Cindy lived a full life and toward the end said she “was
ready”. That may be what fate called for
but, absent her cancer, she was headed for more adventures.
A celebration of life will be held on Sunday, February 16th, from 2:30 to 5:30 in the Reston Community
Center at Lake Anne (1609 Washington Plaza North). If you plan to attend, please let us know at van.foster@comcast.net or 703.437.3138.